Monday, October 13, 2008

Books, books, books

On Sunday I happened to be wandering past a book shop, and noticed a bunch of poker books in the bargain bin. Most of them were not up to much, but I did pick up a copy of Secrets of Professional Pot Limit Omaha by Rolf Slotboom. It looks like a very interesting book. Slotboom introduces a tight aggressive short stack strategy that won him a lot of money in European casinos. The basic idea is to play premium hands and try to get all-in preflop or on the flop in big multi-way pots. If there is a maniac on the table, you actually want him on your *left*, not on your right according to conventional wisdom - that way you can limp and let the maniac raise for you, eventually reraising close to all-in. Omaha purists loathe short stackers (2+2 threads on the subject are quite amusing), so I guess you engage this approach at your peril!

On top of that, my 2+2 books arrived yesterday, so I now have quite the little poker library. I have started on Stox, and it looks like good advice and a pretty straightforward read (though one I will probably want to revisit a few times). The Mathematics of Poker is incredibly dense, and looks like it contains as many words as the other four books combined - I'm actually looking forward to getting into that too.

1 comment:

TiocfaidhArLa said...

Enjoy the books ... I'll be interested to discuss the Maths of Poker with you when you get into it.

Stox is very good too, it'll be interesting to hear how much you learn given that 6-max limit is your game already.

As for the PLO short-stacking strategy, I'm not so sure. I haven't seen the book, so will be interested to see what represents a premium hand (as dominating isn't as common so you're rarely a massive favourite - AA and 9TJQ dbl suited, I suppose).

In a casino, I can see it working just because of the volume of gamblers playing with danglers and other substandard hands. Online, I doubt if it would return much.

Nice find tho' ... IMO, PLO Is definitely the game of the future.